On 7/2/05, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Jul 2005, Orion Adrian wrote:
> >
> > But it's not just one problem I see that I'm trying to fix. I see a lot
> > when it comes to layout ranging from giving control to the wrong person
> > (web designers and not web site consumers) to not matching the mental
> > model of people designing layout (i.e. using margins and padding as
> > tools for layout). I'm also trying to make the number of properties
> > smaller, the interactions fewer and the implementation of the system as
> > a whole easier. So no, it's not just about :column().
>
> As far as new layout mechanisms go, there are several proposals being
> discussed in the CSS working group (and the W3C has a whole task force
> just about layout). If you have any concrete proposals I'm sure they would
> be considered.
I have a few new layout mechanisms. What I'd like to know is this:
What is the purpose of CSS? Is it to?
1) Provide presentational elements needed by HTML?
2) Provide layouts for GUIs?
3) Provide styling for GUIs?
4) Style documents?
5) Something else?
The stated goal on the W3C page is:
"Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a simple mechanism for adding style
(e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents."
which doesn't seem to be acurate as we've spent an inordinate amount
of time working on making advertisers happy, giving them positioning
capabilities that don't belong in a document styling language. If
we're talking about just styling documents, CSS 1.0 was far and away
enough for the job and probably had stuff it didn't need. Columns
would have been nice, but come on, hover on any element?
Orion Adrian